Nathalie Du Pasquier

“How thoughts chase one another.” Nathalie Du Pasquier
by Irene Sofia Comi

In the case of Nathalie Du Pasquier, we might say that every work of hers has to do with painting. After all, the artist has painted every day in her studio since 1987. In Intercity, the title of the site-specific project designed by the artist for Zazà Ramen, the walls and other architectural elements which make up the space are treated as if they were canvases that, once joined together, make up a single overarching structure. Like in a polyptych split into different scenes, it is the coherence of the composition that holds the work together. When applying the paint, Du Pasquier chooses to cover the entire surface available to her, subdivided into at least five modules to which just as many fields of colour correspond; she also includes the column in the centre of the room, coating in bright red.

The project conceived by the artist is an environmental work, one in which the real space ends up merging with the work’s representation space. This environmental dimension not only dialogues with the tradition of wall painting, but may also be related to other works created by the artist. The recent ‘room-works’, presented in 2021 in the exhibitions at the Macro Museum in Rome and at APALAZZOGALLERY in Brescia, and the series of Cabine (created since 1999) come to mind, where walls, works and objects are conceived as a whole, drawing onto the space surfaces, three hundred and sixty degrees.

The brushstrokes that make up the central strip of Intercity are inscribed within a rectangle with thick, black strokes that seem to mimic the function of the frame. Although these elements seem vaguely familiar to us, for the artist they are in fact ‘non-existent things’. Are we looking out the window of a speeding train? Are they images from a dream? Or perhaps even abstractions? It is not important to define this with any degree of certainty, for what we see is painted space, both real and mental at the same time. At the heart of this viewing experience is in fact the very principle of reworking reality, which occurs when personal memories and external visual stimuli blend together.

Following this logic, the artist toys with the aggregation of various components in many of her works. In addition to pictorial still-life images, she also does so with wood sculptures, drawings on paper, tiles, textiles and other media linked to publishing and design. The ceramic vases set up in the bookshop also fit into this logic: begun in 2018 in the light of her collaboration with the company Post Design, they dialogue with projects produced by the artist years earlier in the world of design (among other things, Du Pasquier was one of the founders of the Memphis group).

And so Intercity is a set of elements that join together to create associations, a project very much in keeping with the artist’s sensitivity. Her intervention makes the Zazà space real yet suspended, true to life yet abstract. It is organised and geometric, yet at the same time vaguely familiar. It is playful and moody… just as “thoughts chase one another,” in Nathalie’s own words.

BIOGRAPHY

Nathalie Du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1957 and has lived in Milan since 1979. Until 1986 she worked as a designer and in 1981 she was one of the founding members of the postmodern design group Memphis. She designed numerous “Decorated Surfaces”: fabrics, carpets, plastic laminates, furniture and objects. Starting from 1987, painting became her main activity. Her first international monographic exhibition was held at the Kunsthalle in Vienna (2016), curated by Luca Lo Pinto, with whom she then exhibited at the Macro in Rome (2021), in her first museum solo exhibition in Italy. Her works have been exhibited in numerous international institutions; among others, the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2017) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019).